Sentencing for so-called "white-collar" financial crimes was more lenient than maximum federal sentencing guidelines until those guidelines were toughened in 1984.
Also, there has been growing sentiment among judges that white-collar criminals should be treated the same as other criminals, especially in the light of savings and loan scandals emerging in the mid-1980s.
It was 1990 before the first successful use of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law to convict savings and loan fraud.
RICO was enacted to prosecute illusive organized crime.
Critics charge that pre-trial forfeiture of assets under RICO gives prosecutors too much power, and causes companies to go out of business before trial.
Virtually any financial fraud can now become a RICO case.
The Justice Department reported that 1990 saw "a dramatic increase [nation-wide] in the length of [white-collar] sentences".
The harshest individual sentence was 25 years, and the largest penalty has been $650 million.
White-collar sentences vary proportionate to the extent of financial harm, and according to each defendant's degree of knowing culpability and cooperation with prosecutors.
Judges can impose any combination of prison time, fines, court costs, costs of incarceration, restitution, probation, suspended sentences and community service.
Non-criminal remedies include injunctions, civil penalties, or civil litigation.
Some judges have issued tough sentences, explicitly calling them a "deterrent" to other would-be criminals, such as "The sentence will send a message to other savings and loan owners that white-collar crime doesn't pay".
But other judges' tough verbal warnings have not matched their more lenient sentences.
